English's great "vowel movement," or "shift happens, baby!"

[FanDeAliFee]

Students native in a European language other than English can have a lot of trouble with English vowels, because English doesn't follow the common pattern of pronunciation. Perhaps most vividly for Alizée fans is the example provided when she start to sing Fifty-Sixty.

Below find a brief explanation of this divergence, made by excerpting the references provided by online pages which are linked.

Everything2
"The Great Vowel Shift is what divides Middle English (the language of Chaucer) from Modern English, the earliest monuments of which include Shakespeare and the King James Bible... When you study European languages you find the vowels are usually similar... [But] with all the... long vowels... English is often nothing like the continental."

Wikipedia
"The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language... the two highest long vowels became diphthongs, and the other five underwent an increase in tongue height with one of them coming to the front... The surprising speed and the exact cause of the shift are continuing mysteries..."

a student's class oration
"If anyone is interested in reading this, this is a speech I typed and delivered for my Communications Class of Public Speaking on The Transition of the English Language... If you want to get an idea of what the Vowel Shift sounded like, listen to pirate talk in the next pirate movie you see. Linguists speculate that 'Pirate English' remained stuck in this vowel shift because these raiders lived far away from where standardized English was developing. Instead of saying mate, the pirates say mataye as in 'ahoy mataye.'"

I'd hate to think this means Lilly need study with Fée Clochette's nemesis Captain Hook!

[Deepwaters]

The student made some pretty serious factual errors in that speech, I'm afraid.

"To illustrate, the hwaet of Old English lost the initial H sound to become the what of today."

The what of today DOES have the initial H sound. Say it, you'll hear it. We write it with the letters reversed from the way we say it: it's pronounced HWAT.

"Notice that he was called William, rather than the French equivalent, Guillame."

No, he wasn't. He was called "Guillaume le batard" or "Guillaume le duc" or "Guillaume de Normandie," in French. The Normans, although of Viking ancestry, by 1066 spoke French, not a Scandinavian tongue. Guillaume has been Anglicized to William for English students of history, because he became King of England, but in his time he was always called Guillaume.

"Overall, English became a trilingual country where English, French, and Latin were all spoken. However, after the Black Death the surviving common people became more valuable due to the scarcity of labor. As a result, the laborers native tongue of English assumed even a greater proportion among the three languages."

Not quite. England was never really a "trilingual" country. Latin was the language of the Church service and of serious scholarship (that was true throughout western Europe, not just in England). But it was not a language commonly spoken, even among scholars. French was the language of the court and the nobility, English the language of the common people. The overwhelming majority of the people spoke English, not French or Latin, but if you wanted to get anywhere with the ruling class, you needed to speak French as well, and if you wanted a career in scholarship or the Church (not just in England but throughout western Europe) you needed to read and write Latin. The typical Norman noble, though, was not literate in Latin (or in French or English, commonly), nor was the typical peasant or townsman.

Over time, the Norman aristocracy ceased thinking of itself as Norman or French and started thinking of itself as English. It's conceivable the Black Death contributed to this, but it certainly wasn't the sole cause. Anglo-Norman (the Old French dialect of the conquerors) remained the language of the English court until the 15th century, although literature resurfaced in Middle English in the 14th (e.g. Chaucer). By the time of the Tudors, the transformed English language had replaced Norman French as the court tongue.

The Great Vowel shift is indeed the main difference between Middle and Modern English, a difference in pronunciation rather than in writing. But the sample presented at the beginning of the OP is in Old English, not Middle English. To see a good sample of written Middle English, go here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sourc...olog-para.html As you can see, although it's quite archaic, the written version of Middle English is recognizable as English and is not so radically different as to be considered a foreign language, while Old English is completely indecipherable to modern English speakers.

[FanDeAliFee]

Originally Posted by Deepwaters

The student made some pretty serious factual errors in that speech, I'm afraid.

I rarely fail to enjoy your postings.

I confess I was charmed by the expedient allegation about "Pirate English," which provides vivid AUDIO memory examples accessible to almost everyone. I didn't read much more of the student report, as I was content merely to mark its lay provenance as a caveat. I wonder what grade the student got - did he say?

I have not worked through my recall of "Pirate English" to persuade myself it is a faithful illustration of the shifting vowels based on the documented changes. Perhaps you are aware of online audio/videos produced by serious scholars which do the job better, and you can share them with us. The new, cost-free hosting of online audio content is such a wonderful opportunity for that!

Originally Posted by Deepwaters

The what of today DOES have the initial H sound. Say it, you'll hear it.

I would love to ask a native French speaker willing to be frank which aspects of English pronunciation are grist for the humor mill among Francophones. I would not be surprised to hear it is our non-silent (aspirated) letter "H." If so, perhaps there are even some jokes in which a Frenchman panting hard because he is out of breath is comically mistaken for an Englishman. Isn't it interesting that the déclassé Cockney breaks with RP in silencing his "H"? I doubt it is because he aspires to copy the French - and so wonder why.

Originally Posted by Deepwaters

"Notice that he was called William, rather than the French equivalent, Guillame."

No, he wasn't. He was called "Guillaume le batard" or "Guillaume le duc" or...

Next you'll be telling us Jesus didn't speak King James English. Or even that the people he knew well didn't call him Jesus at all! To be serious, the new, free, online availability of original sources attested by recognized scholarly institutions is a great opportunity for students to disabuse themselves of "Lies My Teacher Told Me" in a way which never before was practical.

Originally Posted by Deepwaters

...French was the language of the court and the nobility ...if you wanted to get anywhere with the ruling class, you needed to speak French as well... By the time of the Tudors, the transformed English language had replaced Norman French as the court tongue.

But they kept Dieu et mon droit. I guess it was just too darn expensive to buy all new towels each time the kids got married!

Originally Posted by Deepwaters

The Great Vowel shift is indeed the main difference between Middle and Modern English, a difference in pronunciation rather than in writing.

Deep, could you speak to the following question? I suppose oft-repeated hand-copying of the Bible and other classics would tend to have a conservative effect on spelling. But I have typically been told that all the same (perhaps because of written messages, charters, etc.) English spelling was highly idiosyncratic for much of its history, typically guided by the personal phonetic principles of the document author rather than any orthodoxy. In the United States, public schools only took up a serious effort to regularize spelling in the late 19th century. As a result, if you do genealogy research which reaches back far enough, you are advised to look for variants of FAMILY NAME spelling, even for educated families! So, in what sense do we mean that the Great Vowel Shift is a "difference in pronunciation rather than in spelling," when spelling is so undisciplined? Do classics like the Bible provide the invariant spelling orthodoxy, despite any popular inconsistency in spelling?

And I think it is interesting to raise methodological questions. In an age before the objective recording of audio (i.e. temporal air pressure variation), our evidence of pronunciation rests on highly imperfect written-evidence tricks like puns and rhymed verse. I guess until we perfect the time machine, there will always be room for new works on pre-audio-recording-era pronunciation as we uncover new written works or look at old ones again with new tools, some of which may rely upon computer analysis too labor-intensive to have been done earlier. You may recall that in the film "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," Mr. Chipping rebels against reformed Latin pronunciation, viz. the change between the soft and hard pronunciation of the letter "C." A naive person might have thought that by Victorian times no new legalistic scholarship might have succeeded in remaking so basic a principle in the absence of undebatable objective evidence.

[Deepwaters]

You are right that spelling wasn't standardized until after American independence, on either side of the pond, which is why the differences exist in standard spellings between the U.S. and other English-speaking countries. I should have said "differences in written versus spoken English," rather than "differences in spelling." There isn't that much difference between the written English of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare, but Chaucer is considered Middle English while Shakespeare is (barely) modern English.

The experiment that I posted on this thread -- http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4824 -- shows what I'm talking about. Try to read Beowulf. Then try to read Canterbury Tales. Then (if you can read modern French) try to read Roland. What I found is that both Canterbury and Roland are doable, although very archaic. In Roland, you find "Carles li reis, nostre empere magnes" instead of "Carles le roi, notr' empereur grand," and "qui" is spelled "ki," and there's all kinds of other weirdness, but if you can read modern French you can understand it. In Canterbury, you find "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soot the droghte of March hath perced to the root, and bathed every veyne in swich licour, of which vertu engendered is the flour" -- some words are bizarre, but can't you get the general sense of it? Obviously he's being poetic about "when it's springtime," right? April with its sweet showers has pierced through the droughts of March, and made the flowers bloom. Not so hard.

But Beowulf? Old English? "Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon." What the heck is THAT? That's ENGLISH? Getoutahere!

Between Beowulf and Chaucer we had the Norman conquest and the centuries of French-speaking English courts. The difference between those two versions of English represents the traumatic, catastrophic change in the language created by the Conquest. The difference between Chaucer's English and what we speak today, or between Roland's Old French and what you would hear in today's Paris, is the normal evolution of a language over time, absent such a massive event.

You're absolutely right about the methodology questions. How DO we know that Chaucer spoke with a different pronunciation than Shakespeare? For that matter, how do we know how Shakespeare's actors pronounced his plays? No recordings from back then. All we have is the written material. I don't think we can even rely on puns, because these were poets and would do things with language in their verse that they wouldn't normally do talking. So I have no idea how we even know there was such a thing as the Great Vowel Shift. It would be interesting to get an answer to that.

[Edcognito]

Originally Posted by Deepwaters

"Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon."

Gesundheit!



Ed